by Kris Radish
Derrick is now totally awake and listening to this story as if someone is revealing details on how to find a massive hidden treasure. When Jane pauses to fill her glass again, Derrick realizes that she genuinely cares about these Tuesday-night women. He looks at her in a different way and feels strangely happy at the thought that she feels bad about what happened. Perhaps the wine, her constant talking, even the way her shoulder keeps moving back and forth, are simply her way of letting go.
Jane explains how Leah finished bandaging Grace and instructed Kit to go get some wet paper towels so that she could wipe off Grace’s leg.
“I could have done that,” Jane says, almost pouting.
“Honey, you were the one who shot her,” Derrick bravely reminds her.
Jane’s eyes get very large, and this is when Derrick tells himself that he will keep his mouth shut until she finishes the story, rise to leave, kiss her on the top of her head, and exit the room as quickly as possible. Jane wants to talk tonight, not listen. Maybe he shouldn’t be happy at all.
“She did not want me near her. She made that very clear. Even after I said I was sorry, twice! I even thought she might want to keep the arrow as a souvenir, and she sort of snarled at me.”
Oh, Jane!
Derrick is inching toward the edge of his chair. The story must be ending soon. Please. Keep the arrow for a souvenir? Is Jane drunk or delusional? Is the story almost over so I can get a few hours of sleep?
But Jane is just getting cranked up. She may never let him go. Derrick watches her eyeing his wineglass and knows that she wants it. He can’t remember the last time his wife had one glass of wine and put the cork back in the bottle. He has been monitoring the dwindling wine collection. Last Thursday he counted sixteen empty bottles in the blue recycling bin. Before long he expects her to get a DUI, and that will be the next class she must attend.
Jane is now explaining how Grace begged them—begged as in actually grabbed Kit by the leg while she was still lying on the ground kind of begged—not to make a big deal out of the arrow-in-the-foot incident.
“Can you imagine?”
“Honey,” he says, trying to reason with her, “don’t you think it’s embarrassing enough to have to go to a class like this without having to tell people you got shot in the foot with an arrow while you were at the class?”
“Well, I’m sure none of us wants to take out an ad,” Jane agrees.
“You don’t want anyone to know, either, do you?” Derrick looks exhausted again, and he’s tired of listening to her trying to justify her behavior. “It’s kind of embarrassing if you look at her side and your side—even if you didn’t shoot her on purpose.”
This is when the secrets try to ooze from Jane’s pores. It’s absolutely revealing how her mouth tightens. Her hands grip the wineglass so hard her knuckles turn white and her breathing deepens. Her physical manifestations are a dead giveaway. She’s fighting hard not to totally fall apart, not to be too emotional, not to be too vulnerable. But she stops herself. Poor Derrick has heard enough, Jane convinces herself. What an embarrassment she’s been to him, too!
A part of Jane does want to let go and tell Derrick the reason she’s rambling and drinking so much is because she feels like a big baby who keeps making mistakes. She wants to tell him she’s scared and almost fainted when she realized what she had done. She wants to have him pull her into his chest and tell her it’s okay, and that she was just excited and made a mistake. She wants to be soft and gentle, and even the thought of that, of totally letting go, absolutely terrifies her. So Jane stops.
Derrick can sense an invisible wall going up. It’s as if Jane has pressed a button and is now encased in a protective package that lets nothing out and nothing in. She’s keeping more and more of herself inside there and Derrick is exhausted, not just from lack of sleep but from the emotional weight of loving her so much, worrying about her, and praying that this class helps her to move forward.
Jane does take a moment to imagine that Grace would probably be looking at her in the same perplexed way that Derrick is looking at her right now. Grace’s feelings for Jane must be wretched by now. What kind of a fool can’t follow a simple instruction? Am I that competitive? Can’t I keep my mouth shut for three seconds?
Truth be told, even as a part of her felt sorry for Jane, who looked as if she was going to faint, Grace couldn’t bring herself to go there.
But Grace now has a much larger problem to deal with. To hell with the bandaged foot, which she must somehow explain at work in the morning. Maybe she can get away with a random dog-bite story. What happened after she left Bob’s Home on the Range was even worse than getting shot in the foot or attacked by a pack of wolves.
First she begged not to be taken to the closest hospital, which is where she happens to work. How humiliating would that be? If anyone there found out about the anger-management counseling, that would definitely be the beginning of the end.
Grace had really been having a good time, and thinking that her fears about others discovering her at a shooting range were baseless and that she was overreacting. Shooting a gun was something she never thought she would do. Her mother would really blow a gasket over that one! Once, after the third round of firing, Grace actually started laughing out loud as she imagined a conversation where she told her mother she had just gone target shooting.
She was laughing so hard she almost missed firing the next round. She couldn’t tell the other women what was so funny. How do you tell another grown woman that you were raised in the Dark Ages and that your mother has never worn a pair of denim jeans? Who would believe her if she admitted that so many turns in her life were programmed by parents who admonished more than nurtured her? Would they believe that a successful nurse, a hardworking mother, a woman who once brought home five lonely patients on Thanksgiving because they had nowhere to go had been all but disowned because she dared to get a divorce?
Even as Grace worries herself into one headache after another because maybe her mother is right, maybe she is a total failure, one part of her would absolutely love to whip out her bullet-riddled target and stick it in her mother’s face.
The arrow in the foot would be a different story. Grace insisted on driving her own car home and first had to prove to Dr. Bayer that she could operate the brake and gas with her right, unpierced foot. Then Dr. Bayer insisted on following her home. Then she insisted on walking her inside and then she would not leave Grace until her daughter came home.
Kelli was working late at her part-time job at the sandwich shop, and Grace refused to call her for a variety of reasons, the least of them being the fact that Kelli did not know that her mother had gone to a shooting range. Dr. Bayer refused to leave; instead, she pushed past Grace, found the tea stash, ignored the messy kitchen and the shabby furniture, and sat down.
“I can’t leave unless someone is here,” Dr. Bayer said forcefully. “That’s all there is to it.”
Grace tried to reach Karen, but Karen wasn’t home. She held out for an entire hour and drank two cups of tea. She finally broke down and called Evan. Sweet, kind Evan, with his dark everything, who looked at her every day at work as if he were a lovesick puppy.
He came quickly and pushed past Dr. Bayer, rushed to where Grace was sitting, immediately knelt down by her side, and wanted to know if she was okay.
Grace realized that having Dr. Bayer in her house was like being on live television. Dr. Bayer might look cute, standing there in her sweatshirt and tennis shoes, but under that cotton was a keen observer. She saw the crumbing house. She noticed the chipped cups, and that Kelli was a slob. And before she left she noticed the tall black man with lovely eyes who threw himself at Grace’s knees and promised to stay until Kelli arrived.
“Kelli, this is Evan. He was working late tonight and came to stay with me because I hurt my foot,” Grace told her daughter, totally leaving out the part about Dr. Bayer, the arrow, and her growing hatred of the woman who shot her in the foot.
Kelli st
ood in the doorway and looked at her mother, then at Evan, then back at her mother, and started to smile as if she had just remembered that she’d gotten a full ride to Harvard.
“Right, Mom,” Kelli said, laughing. “And I’m going to win the daughter-of-the-year contest.”
Evan was paralyzed. He had been sitting next to Grace and holding her hand. The moment Kelli walked in Grace didn’t just drop his hand; she shoved it about a mile away.
“What do you mean?” Grace asked, breaking out in a hot flash that was about to set a personal record.
Kelli totally ignored her lying mother and politely turned toward Evan, stuck out her hand, and said, “Evan, it’s nice to finally meet you. Thanks for babysitting my mom. Mom, let me know if I can help you when he leaves.”
Then Kelli rolled her eyes at her mother, threw her backpack on the kitchen table, and went down the hall to take a shower.
Grace had absolutely no idea what to do or say next. Evan closed his eyes, dropped both hands in his lap, got up, turned to leave, and then came back. He stood in front of her, closed his eyes, and then reached out to gently lay his hand on top of her head.
“You are a good woman, Grace,” he said softly. “I’m leaving now, but I’m not going anywhere.”
After he left, Grace sat alone in the dark living room for a very long time. Her foot ached, her head throbbed, and her heart felt like a dead weight that could drop out of her chest at any moment. She struggled to believe Evan and to fight off the old echoes of her mother’s voice that still occasionally ricocheted throughout her mind, telling her again and again what a disappointment she had become.
And damn that Jane, whose arrow had now triggered an avalanche of events. And yet she could still smile, because firing the rifles and shooting the arrows really was fun.
She fell asleep like that, grousing about Jane, thinking she might like to take Kelli shooting someday, with her bandaged foot resting on the coffee table that was held together with duct tape. But she woke up suddenly, well after midnight, and there it was. She had an idea about Jane; it was like a mild tickle in the back of her throat, and she couldn’t wait to get to work and scratch it, even if that meant she had to cross a very sacred line.
Leah and Kit took the evening’s chain of events in stride. As mothers, they had both seen and experienced a variety of physical tragedies—cut fingers, one broken arm, three bicycle accidents, an emergency appendectomy, a baseball bat to the head, and stitches times ten. That’s what happens when there are children in the house.
The arrow-in-the-foot seemed funny to them on the ride home from Bob’s. Funny in that thank-God-it’s-over kind of way when the victim is finally safe, the blood has been cleaned up, and everyone has safely limped away.
“It’s the last thing I thought would happen with adults doing this kind of thing,” Leah says.
“Well, yes, but then you have to consider Jane,” Kit says, as they pause at a stoplight. “She seems like an accident waiting to happen.”
Leah, who has learned the hard way to think before she speaks, pauses for a moment. Jane, to her, seems like a lost, hard soul. Something is clearly amiss.
“I think if I had to describe her in one word it would be hollow,” Leah says.
Kit thinks about that as they get close to the shelter. Maybe Leah’s right. Maybe Jane needs the attention to fill up that space inside her that’s so empty.
“I guess,” Kit says, pulling in front of the building. “But there’s something else about her, too. I hate to be catty but she seems so familiar, yet I can’t place her. And there’s something else, too.”
“Like what?” Leah asks, with her hand on the door.
“She’s almost mysterious, you know, but it’s like she has a secret. There’s something going on, something … I don’t know even how to say it.”
Leah smiles and opens the door. “I can barely keep my head above water,” she says, getting out of the car. “You worry about Jane, okay? And, in spite of the arrow-in-the-foot mess, I really had a blast tonight.”
Before Kit can say anything else, Leah has closed the car door, mouthed “Thank you,” and is halfway up the sidewalk.
Kit pulls away, hating herself for not asking Leah if she needed anything, if there was something she could do for her, and then thinking that perhaps her female ancestors had it right. Go to the bedroom, turn off the lights, take a pill, and everything goes away.
“Maybe I’m just as crazy as they all were,” she mutters, pulling away, and driving toward her empty house but also excited to tell Peter, or maybe even Ronnie, about the wild night she has just experienced.
Hours later, when the stars have decided to disappear and there is a blink of light rising from the black edges of the earth, Derrick wakes up when he hears his wife drunkenly snoring beside him.
He lies there for a few minutes and then lifts up his head to look at her. Jane is on her back. Her arms are flung over the top of her head and her mouth is open almost as wide as the rim of her favorite wineglass. Maybe he’d be snoring, too, if he had just shot someone with an arrow.
Maybe.
He turns to look at her while she stirs and turns onto her side. “Open up to me, please,” he whispers. “I can’t take much more.”
Frustrated, Derrick slips quietly from bed and moves across the floor to the walk-in closet. Jane is not moving. He expects she will lie in bed like this half the morning, because she will have another hangover. Then she will get up, promise herself that today will be new and different, and try really hard for at least thirty minutes to make that happen. But she will still keep so many of her emotions locked inside of her own heart.
He has no idea that she’s been writing down what makes her happy, that she has held the soft hand of a little girl, that she’s been thinking of going hiking again—without an official assignment.
“To hell with it all,” he mutters, moving into the closet.
He starts from the left side and first grabs the damned red stilettos she was wearing when she totally went off her rocker. He moves to the solid black ones and then the blue ones. He gathers them all up and walks silently down the steps, through the kitchen, and into the garage, where he throws them one at a time into the garbage bin.
Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. When the shoes hit the bin, they sound like little firecrackers. That’s what Jane used to be—a firecracker. Now she’s a time bomb.
All six shoes end up on top of yesterday’s white plastic garbage bag. Derrick walks back through the house, up the steps, and gets back into bed, where he shifts away from Jane and watches the night sky slip away.
He doesn’t go back to sleep, but an hour later Derrick Castoria goes back into the garage, removes all six shoes, carries them back to the closet, refuses to look at his wife, finally gets up to dress, and then silently leaves for work.
“Maybe it’s me,” he says, as he turns and throws his sleeping wife a kiss from the driveway. “But I don’t think it is.”
Derrick has no idea that his Jane, awakened by his rummaging in the closet, has heard and seen everything.
25
The Challenges of Change
Phyllis absolutely hates winter. She was never the kind of cute little puppy who frolicked in the snow, tried to dig up old bones in the frozen ground, or begged to go for walks when there was frost on the window.
Tonight it’s so cold outside that when Phyllis puts her nose close to the metal door she’s tempted to pee on the brown braided rug by the front door. She’s done it before and, of course, paid the price. The thought of the punishment—the closed bedroom door with no access to her beloved Olivia while she sits in the big chair—is too much for Phyllis.
When Olivia opens the door and steps onto the little concrete porch, Phyllis does not walk or trot but runs to the first tree. She goes to the bathroom so quickly that Olivia doesn’t even have time to step onto the sidewalk.
Phyllis has managed to zip past Olivia and is actually thinking about b
arking to get the door open and get back inside. Phyllis barks about twice a year, and it’s usually because she’s so happy that she wants Olivia to know it, too.
It’s a mystery to Phyllis why Olivia doesn’t stay in that warm vacation place they go sometimes when Olivia gives her a tiny white pill, makes her get inside a cage—which she doesn’t mind because she’s so sleepy—and then opens the cage to let her out at some noisy spot with lots of people.
There is another very nice person in that warm place who constantly slips Phyllis red and green dog biscuits. And there are also so many tall waving trees to pee on there that Phyllis almost goes mad with excitement every time they go for a walk.
Tonight, though, there’s no escaping the cold. Olivia gladly lets Phyllis back into the house. It’s Thursday and Olivia has to figure out what to do with her wild clients the following week.
She walks into the kitchen, sticks a dog biscuit into her bathrobe pocket, grabs a mug from the shelf, and rummages in the cabinet for a tea bag.
She’s just as sick of the Chicago weather as Phyllis is. Her veterinarian told her that Phyllis feels the cold exactly like she does. Her bones hurt, the joints ache, and yes, even old dogs with fur coats love to bask in the warm weather.
“Soon, girl,” Olivia shouts from the kitchen as she dips her tea bag in and out of the water she has just heated in the microwave.
Phyllis settles on her cushion in the living room. She’s getting a little nervous. She hasn’t heard the ice cubes hit the glass, but Olivia is doing something in there. She lifts up her head and tries to look around the big chair to see what’s going on.
Olivia is just about to sit down when she realizes what lies ahead of her. Those four women. Flying arrows. A parade of mumbling. The Tuesday-night-excuse brigade. She manages a quick laugh. It’s only Thursday, but she must stay on top of these bad girls.
She turns back to the kitchen, reaches up and into the cabinet where she keeps her bottles of alcohol, grabs the whiskey, and pours it into her tea until the cup is so full that she isn’t certain she can make it to the chair without spilling any.